An Emerging South-East Asian Brand: MK Restaurants

Abstract

This case study examines in detail the factors responsible for the emergence of a highly successful South-east Asian brand – MK Restaurants. MK restaurants is a privately owned company that has grown from humble beginnings to a chain of over 250 restaurants in Thailand and tasted success in expanding into Europe and Japan. Our analysis suggest that MK Restaurants has built the brand from through living a set of brand values, astute positioning that appeals to a wide demographic and the global trend towards healthier eating, and a marketing communications budget that exceeds McDonalds and KFC in Thailand. Furthermore, brand extensions, a genuine customer centric philosophy that is practiced at all levels in the firm, an adherence to the service-profit-chain concept (i.e., happy staff are more likely to deliver better service quality, which in turn drives customer loyalty and repeat patronage), and a state of the art logistic and supply chain system have all driven brand success. Key lessons for other service brands are drawn and explicated in the paper's final section.

Analysis of the Catalan Haute Cuisine Success: The Role of Education and Network Creation

“…In the restaurant sector the two most important variables are price (Parsa et al 2005;Gupta et al 2012;Agarwal and Dahm 2015) and loyalty (Kotler et al 1996;Agarwal and Dahm 2015). In some cases a strong brand is also important but often depends on the parent company, which is out of the scope of this study (Itthiopassagul et al 2009;Vazifehdust et al 2011). Some of the success factors proposed, such as customer satisfaction (Brown et al 2014;Jacob et al 2014) and quality standards (Bernardo et al 2017) are currently analysed in the literature but more research is needed as well as for innovation (Ottenbacher 2007) and creativity (Balazs 2002;Stierand 2012).…”